L. Neil Smith is particularly known for his libertarian science fiction, especially his alternate history "North American Confederacy" series that is kicked off with The Probability Broach. Personally, I find those books rather farfetched and too polemical--and I consider myself a libertarian. The Crystal Empire is different. One Amazon reviewer said that if there was a libertarian message in this one, he didn't see it, and another reviewer who says he finds Smith's philosophy "idiotic" agrees and says this is one of his favorite novels period.

I wouldn't go so far. This isn't a five star book for me. But of the almost dozen books by Smith I've read, I'd say this is his best precisely because it doesn't read as libertarian propaganda. It's similar in premise to Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt but predates it by over a decade. In this timeline, the Black Plague proved even more disastrous than was the case in our own history, with 90 percent mortality rates that caused the collapse of Western civilization and Saracen-Jewish, Mughal-Arab and Sino-Aztec Empires arose to fill the vacuum. The first chapter especially was terrific, with a killer last line. Decades have passed since I first read this novel, and I still remembered that opening well and it still had impact. The next hundred or so pages I found a bit slow, but it picked up considerably once Sedrich Sedrichsohn meets damsel-in-distress Ayesha. Although I wouldn't put this novel up there with the very best of science fiction, it's a well-imagined alternate history and world and a good adventure yarn. ( )